We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.
Thom YorkeRead
I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.
Interpretation
Thom Yorke emphasizes using art as a tool to challenge mainstream media's biases and corporate influences.
In this quote, Thom Yorke expresses his view that instead of merely striving for change, artists should utilize their craft—specifically language and music—as powerful instruments to critique and combat the predominantly right-leaning mainstream media landscape. He underscores the idea that art can serve as a form of resistance against corporate interests and political frameworks that shape public discourse.
In practice
During a political rally, to inspire young artists to use their talents for social justice.
We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.
I'm achingly aware of my own limitations as both part of the human race and as an individual. I'm just, casting this out that, maybe, I'm not so perfect as is the affront I oft put on. After all, the lyric is 'I wish I was special'. I truly just want to be loved and accepted, I think, like all humans.
There's a pervading sense of loneliness I've had since the day I was born. Maybe a lot of other people feel the same way, but I'm not about to run up and down the street asking everybody if they're as lonely as I am. I'd probably get locked up.
People in bands don't have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid.
I don't think young people are as demoralized as the media and government would like us to think. The obvious sign of that is how strong and how close personal connections are and how much people are able to build a life for themselves, despite all this stuff that's been thrown at them.
I tell you what's really ridiculous--going into a bookstore and there's all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you're already dead.
If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves? We claim British rights not by charter only! We are born to them.
Political experience is political inefficacy.
If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game.
The chief internal enemies of any state are not spies nor saboteurs nor the paid agents of foreign governments. They are, on the contrary, those myriads of public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people.
In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.
More and more people in my country recognise the dangers of having their governors appointed by Putin and having no influence in parliament because Parliament today is also following instructions from Kremlin and no longer represents its people.
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